Are you remembering to test your landing pages?

A landing page is a web page which serves as the entry point for a website or a particular section of a website.

A website conversion means that your visitor has done what you wanted them to do. They might have bought your product, signed up for your newsletter, registered for a webinar, downloaded a whitepaper, or filled out a lead/contact form.

Measuring conversions

You might be surprised by just how widely landing page conversions can vary – between less than 1% and as much as 24.5%. Such large variation can be partly explained by typical conversion rates being different for different industries – a rate that’s great for an eCommerce site is considered mediocre for a financial services company.

However, that’s not the only factor – it might also be the case that your landing pages simply aren’t optimised enough to bring you the best results. If you aren’t continually testing your landing pages over a long period of time, you can easily get left behind by your competitors.

What does conversion testing involve?

Even once your chosen web designer has done their work, you should still keep testing your landing pages, as what worked for you yesterday might not work quite as well tomorrow.

Conversion testing is a form of strategic optimisation that allows you to boost the online leads and sales that you gain from your landing pages. It involves undertaking changes to various elements of your landing pages and measuring the impact that they have on conversions. If a certain modification seems to improve your conversion rate, you keep it. If there’s no discernible improvement, the change is reversed.

A lot of website owners are intimidated by the thought of all of the hard work involved in landing-page testing. But of course, this simply means that those who do go to the effort of testing their landing pages experience even better results compared to competitors who don’t bother with it.

Your landing pages could produce as much as 300% to 500% more conversions as a result of sustained testing, depending on your industry. Just imagine the difference that a three to five-fold increase in your leads, sales and email sign-ups could make to your business’s bottom line.

Tips for making your conversion testing a success

The first advice that I would give for conversion testing is to only test a statistically significant number of site visits – otherwise, you may be wasting your time making changes that don’t deliver the long-term results you’d hoped for.

I would also urge you not to fall into the trap of endlessly testing subtle landing-page elements that most of your site visitors barely notice. Instead, keep your focus firmly on the big elements such as your headlines, images, benefits, form fields, calls to action and overall layout – for example, testing a short page against a long page.

The headline may be an especially great place to start if you have never before performed A/B testing – a type of testing that involves two versions of a landing page being compared to see which one delivers the highest conversions.

The headline, after all, is one of the first things that your landing page visitors will see, so if it doesn’t grab their attention straight away, they might click the browser ‘back’ button and all of your work optimising other elements of your landing page will have been wasted.

However, the other major elements of your landing pages should not be ignored either. From the placement, colour and size of your call-to-action buttons, right through to the form fields and tone of voice, there are so many aspects of your landing pages that can help you to convert better and faster.

Make me your choice of web designer in Warwickshire

Remember that if you wish to carry out your own modifications to your landing pages without having to call in a professional every time you simply need to add some new text and images, it’s a really good idea to have your site designed on WordPress. It’s just such an easy and flexible content management system (CMS) to use, which is why I specialise in it.

Why not contact me, Tracey Rickard, via this simple online contact form today when you would like to use me as your skilled and experienced web designer in Warwickshire?